1. Technical Field
The invention is related to displaying the results of an electronic search, such as a database search, to a user, and more particularly to a system and process for graphically displaying the results of a search to a user on a display via an interactive search results window having a histogram and/or cluster format in which the user views and filters search results items.
2. Background Art
The personal computer will eventually have extremely large amounts of storage capacity, resulting in larger data stores, and search results that will be produced in large sets. These large search results sets will be difficult to analyze effectively. Thus, navigation and filtering (reduction) of the search results is needed.
The typical timeline displays of the search results can be difficult to deal with in certain scales of time or number of objects. Further, clustering of the search results can be advantageous from a filtering standpoint, however, no matter how good some clustering algorithms are, the human eye can do a better job.
Humans are capable of looking a search results and clustering them instantly, and often in multiple ways at once. Hence, a visualization of the search results in way that a human can filter them is the key to handling large results sets. The present invention provides techniques for such a visualization.